“Lou Reed and I had to stop Damien Hirst chopping his hands off”

“Kylie Minogue, Sinéad O’Connor, and Natalie Imbruglia – and we used the name A Tramp, A Drunk and An Unfit Mother.”

CORRECT.

“I’m one of those people who couldn’t care less what people thought of my records. At the time, on purpose my hair was dyed white, and I was wearing big goggly glasses, with the most terrible unmatched clothes I could find. I don’t know how Kylie, Sinéad, and Natalie agreed to be my backing singers, but we had a great time. Brian Eno was also on the keyboard in the shadows. ‘Happy to Be Here’ was bonkers and nonsensical, and on top of that you’ve those three in wigs. We didn’t tell anybody beforehand, so when we started, the audience was looking confused thinking: ‘Huh?’”

You later produced the late Sinéad O’Connor’s 2000 ‘Faith and Courage’ album…

“I’ve got so many great films of Sinéad howling and crying with laugher and joking and larking around. She had a brilliant sense of humour and there was that side of her. There was another side where she’d had such terrible trauma when she was a kid and she would sometimes find it very hard to get rid of it and would get very paranoid. That only happened twice with me – when she was worried about someone outside or something like that. But normally we’d just fall about laughing. She came on holiday with me, stayed in my house, and we had great fun.”

Will those videos ever see the light of day?

“I started transferring them over onto my phone, so I now have an archive where I can type say, ‘Sinéad’ into my phone and millions of footage with her comes up.

Dave demonstrates on his phone…

“See: here’s Sinéad, Kylie and Natalie getting ready to go on TFI Friday [He shows footage of the three of them laughing and joking backstage and adjusting their wigs]. And if I type ‘Shakira’ in, here’s us larking about in Jamaica. I’m trying to think of a context to make the clips into a film which isn’t just behind-the-scenes for the sake of it. I made a trailer called The Art of Chaos which starts with me and Lou Reed in the a basement of a New York club. While we were drunk, we decided to play a little club and ring up a radio station and tell them. Then we got there and realised we didn’t have any instruments. So The Art of Chaos starts with Lou Reed turning round and going: ‘And Dave, who has manifested chaos, is now filming it!’ And then it goes into the film.”

“The one tape I still want to find is when Terry Hall and I were recreating The Shining together down a corridor! [Laughs] We filmed loads of different stuff together that had nothing to do with the music we were making.”